The biggest news of October is that Locaweb was able to deliver Rails Summit Latin America 2008, the largest and the best Rails conference ever in Latin America. They had over 500 attendees, more than 20 speakers, several well known names such as Chad Fowler, Obie Fernandez, the Phusion guys, Dr. Nic, Jay Fields and more2.

As a first in Brazilian tech events, Locaweb offered widespread free wireless internet access as well as power plug outlets throughout the facility. This allowed a higher level of interaction between the attendees. One interesting thing that happened is that a new “open source” project was born during this event, called “morena_opensource” which means something like “open source brunette”.

Locaweb employed several beautiful women to help out during the event and one of them, a young beautiful brunette, became the center of all attention. And as there were ubiquitous internet access, a new Github project was born, with several forks and lots of photos of her being uploaded at once. It was very interesting having one of the creators of Github, Chris Wanstrath himself witness this all happening. Take a look at Dr. Nic speaking about it.

They had real time English to Portuguese and English to Spanish translators so everybody could follow. They had real time presentations from DHH himself as well as Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo directly through a dedicated high speed internet connection. This event surpassed all expectations in many ways. First, it became clear that the Latin America Rails communities are very strong and growing. And the event itself surpassed all excellence standards in many ways. It became something more like a celebration than a traditional passive conference.